The crime sagas that end up ensnaring the public imagination often do so by delivering their thrills with a crafty sort of hypocrisy, casting the hero in a mold unnerving enough to keep the viewer on edge, but heroic (or attractively anti-heroic) enough to develop a rooting interest. Such is the case with "A Prophet," a violent and gripping French film trafficking in both gangster mythology and the prison picture. It comes from Jacques Audiard, who has won many awards ("A...

Joan Didion began her career chronicling a certain ennui afflicting Californians coming up in the Vietnam era who were quickly losing faith in the society their parents created. She sympathized: "At some point between 1945 and 1967," Didion wrote in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," her report on the San Francisco counterculture, "we had somehow neglected to tell these children the rules of the game we happened to be playing. " She found...

Growing up in Mexico, Salma Hayek remembered seeing the " The Prophet ," the bestselling book of 26 prose poems by Kahlil Gibran, on her grandfather's nightstand. "I was very close to him," Hayek recalled. "And to me, when I see the cover, I cannot think of anyone else but him. There's a very special meaning for me with the book. " In 2011, when the project came across her producing desk, Hayek immediately remembered how special the story was to her. She signed on...

Emerging Italian distribution shingle Good Films , on a shopping spree in Cannes, is the first announced buyer for Salma Hayek -produced animated feature "The Prophet," for which it has taken Italian rights from Wild Bunch. The buzz pic, which is based on the bestselling book of 26 prose poems by Lebanese writer and painter Kahlil Gibran, is made up of nine vignettes, each by a different director. "Prophet" is aimed at both children and adult...

"Closure" ✭✭1/2 Cribbing rather effectively from "The Bill Chill," Jake Perry's play for Fringeelement (a new company) has its share of cliches and telegraphed plot machinations, and yet it almost works despite itself thanks to two key performances by Austin Talley and Perry himself. The story treads a familiar path with its tense reunion among estranged friends. They were once a foursome — Matt and Catherine, and Dennis and Maria — paired off in coupledom that has...

Growing up in Mexico, Salma Hayek remembered seeing the " The Prophet ," the bestselling book of 26 prose poems by Kahlil Gibran, on her grandfather's nightstand. "I was very close to him," Hayek recalled. "And to me, when I see the cover, I cannot think of anyone else but him. There's a very special meaning for me with the book. " In 2011, when the project came across her producing desk, Hayek immediately remembered how special the story was to her. She signed on...

My first--and last--visit to a psychic recently yielded one accurate fact: I have a hectic life. It might have been my arriving frantic and five minutes late for my appointment that gave away that news flash rather than the dust clouds the psychic saw around my aura. Because the woman and her tarot cards ended up revealing little about me. I don't know whether the psychic sensed my agitation, but each of her revelations made me wonder what other spirit in the room was worming in on my...

HONG KONG -- Darren Aronofsky 's " Noah " will not be given a commercial release in Indonesia . The Indonesian Censorship Board on Monday announced a decision to ban the film. Censorship Board member Zainut Tauhid Sa'adi told news website Detik that regulators were responding to the values of a society "which highly respects religion and the value of unity." Indonesia is the world's most populous Muslim country. The film has already been banned in parts of the Middle...

Emerging Italian distribution shingle Good Films , on a shopping spree in Cannes, is the first announced buyer for Salma Hayek -produced animated feature "The Prophet," for which it has taken Italian rights from Wild Bunch. The buzz pic, which is based on the bestselling book of 26 prose poems by Lebanese writer and painter Kahlil Gibran, is made up of nine vignettes, each by a different director. "Prophet" is aimed at both children and adult...

In "Sons of the Prophet," the very fine 2011 play by Stephen Karam that deals with the way that life often confounds the two words in that title, a high school football player decides to stick a stuffed deer in the middle of a road in small-town Pennsylvania. A former steelworker happens to be driving down the street. He swerves to avoid the stupid thing, crashes his car and, one week later, drops dead of a heart attack, maybe related, maybe not. This being small-town Pennsylvania, a...

By Steven M. Gorelick. Steven M. Gorelick, teaches and serves in the administration at The City University of New York. His research focuses on the mass media and the dynamics of public panic | March 11, 2003

At first, I imagined her as an Old Testament prophet. She even looked the part. Rageful and indignant, she pleaded that we recognize and atone for the incompetence, the bureaucratic negligence, the apathy that led us to the edge of the apocalypse. How, then, did a prophet become a pest? How did heroism become hubris? FBI agent Coleen Rowley--prophet, whistle-blower, truth-teller--has been a national hero for the last 10 months. Last year, she told FBI Director Robert Mueller that senior FBI...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Evangelical broadcaster Harold Camping, who rallied thousands of followers and stirred an international media frenzy with a failed doomsday prophecy two years ago, has died at his home near San Francisco, a spokeswoman for his radio outlet said on Tuesday. Camping, who was 92, died peacefully in Alameda, California, on Sunday surrounded by members of his family, said Nina Romero, marketing manager for the Oakland-based Family Radio network. ...

The barn was sagging miserably in a forgotten corner of Tuscola County, Mich., bereft of the will to live. Then along came the barn prophet. "Would you look at these beams?" David Ciolek said with awe, striding around the forlorn wreck atop a placid hill east of Frankenmuth. "Some of these are 30-, 40-, 50-foot beams, virgin wood." Yes, but what about the barn wall tilting alarmingly inward and the soaring roof that has seen a century of hard winters? "Oh, that's nothing,"...

It's not clear to me why anyone tries predicting anything, because no one is any good at it. There is a tie at the top of the horrible prognosticators list between sports reporters and political pundits. Often, the greater the apparent expertise, the more wrongheaded the predictions. Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George Will looked into his crystal ball and foresaw a Romney presidency by a 321-217 electoral-vote margin. (The actual tally was 332 - 206 for President Obama.) ...

Here are some things you should not expect from the new animated movie "Mohammad: The Last Prophet," made by a former Disney director and a "The Fox and the Hound" writer: - Do not expect any jokes or wisecracking animal sidekicks; this is not a comedy. - Do not expect catchy songs or dance numbers; this is not a musical. - Do not expect to understand all plot developments; this is not a simple story, or one likely to keep the average American kid glued to the screen.

My initial response, nearly a decade ago, when I first read Marilynne Robinson's novel, "Gilead," was gratitude - for the sheer beauty of the language and the moral complexity of the central character. And since religious themes and language in mainstream literature are sometimes belittled by the critics, it was refreshing that such a book won the Pulitzer Prize. This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members...

In "Sons of the Prophet," the very fine 2011 play by Stephen Karam that deals with the way that life often confounds the two words in that title, a high school football player decides to stick a stuffed deer in the middle of a road in small-town Pennsylvania. A former steelworker happens to be driving down the street. He swerves to avoid the stupid thing, crashes his car and, one week later, drops dead of a heart attack, maybe related, maybe not. This being small-town Pennsylvania, a...

Sony has bought English-language remake rights for Jacques Audiard's 2010 Oscar-nominated French hit, "A Prophet," with Neal Moritz and Toby Jaffe producing. "This is an epic crime saga with compelling characters and original storytelling," said Moritz, who will produce via his Original Film banner. "I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to make an English language version of the film and I am grateful to have the trust of Jacques Audiard and his producers." Columbia Pictures...

Before Sept. 11, 2001, documentary filmmaker Michael Schwarz had a worthy project badly in need of a Daddy Warbucks: a biography of Muhammad, the prophet who founded Islam, the fastest growing religious community in the United States. The usual funding sources expressed polite interest in Schwarz's film, but they were stingy with grant money. Then came the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and people were desperate to know something about Islam, whose name the...